Another View: Adding urgency to curbing our nuclear arsenals

In this July 1, 2010, photo, President Barack Obama speaks in the East Room of the White House in Washington, before signing the Iran Sanctions Bill imposing tough new sanctions against Iran as further punishment for the country's continuing ambitions to become a nuclear power. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

President Barack Obama's call during the State of the Union address to reduce the threat of nuclear war could not have been more timely. The day before the president spoke, North Korea tested a primitive nuclear device, and the following day reports surfaced of Iranian attempts to buy technology that would greatly speed up its production of weapons-grade uranium.

Mr. Obama's remarks focused on cutting the U.S. and Russian strategic arsenals in a way that maintains their deterrent function but reduces the chances of a conflict breaking out by accident or miscalculation. The New START Treaty the president negotiated with Russia in 2010 caps the number of long-range missiles at 1,550 by 2018, but Mr. Obama and his generals believe that number could be cut even further without endangering national security. Currently, each side has about 1,700 such missiles in its arsenal.

The president has the support of the nation's military, which recognizes that the nature of the threats we face has changed since the end of the Cold War. The U.S. no longer needs a massively redundant force to guarantee a devastating response to a Russian first strike. Today, the likelihood of war with Russia has receded to the point where it's more likely a conflict would break out as a result of a technical glitch or human error than by design. Keeping thousands of warheads on hair-trigger alert only compounds that danger.

In the 21st century, the most challenging threats are likely to come not from today's great powers but as a consequence of the proliferation of nuclear weapons and technologies among smaller nations and failed states in politically unstable parts of the world, such as Pakistan and North Africa, or from rogue regimes like North Korea and Iran. In this environment, the greatest danger will be the possibility that a nuclear explosive could fall into the hands of terrorists or other nonstate actors who, by definition, cannot be deterred by the threat of massive retaliation.

Yet we can hardly claim the moral high ground in urging such states to restrain their nuclear ambitions so long as our own arsenals are bristling with arms. Nor do we need 1,700 nuclear warheads to deter an attack from Iran or North Korea. The logic of such an asymmetrical conflict, in which our conventional weapons alone have the capacity to wipe out their entire military, political and economic infrastructure, makes the reduction of a few hundred nuclear warheads irrelevant. ...

Mr. Obama clearly would like to be remembered as a president who helped pull the world a step further back from the abyss, and if he manages to rid the planet of another thousand or so U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons, he will have gone a long way toward fulfilling the promise embodied by the Nobel Peace Prize he was awarded in 2009. We hope that remains a top priority for his administration during the remainder of his second term.

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Another View: Adding urgency to curbing our nuclear arsenals

President Barack Obama's call during the State of the Union address to reduce the threat of nuclear war could not have been more timely. The day before the president spoke, North Korea tested a